Day 2: Appenzell

If you’re going to Switzerland, you generally expect to see:

1.)    Alps

2.)    Cheese

3.)    Chocolate

Indeed, that was our master plan for Day 2: from Konstanz, it’s maybe 90 minutes (ok, two hours) to the Saentis, which towers 2,500 meters above the east Swiss Alps. It’s a classic gondola-cable-car ride & mountaintop panorama restaurant, straight out of 60’s James Bond. I’m told that, on a clear day, you can see the Saentis all the way from France.

Our day was not clear. A low pressure front was swirling right over Western Europe, causing cloud, rain, and even severe flooding stretching from Paris to Bavaria. I really wanted to take the boys up a cable car, but we’d be in a cloud once we got past 1,000 feet. Move along, boys, nothing to see here.

We flipped the script, and decided to stay more earthbound. With some luck, we could manage points 2 and 3, and see some of the better parts of the Appenzell region in which my parents live.

Aside: With some apologies to this fellow, I get the feeling that being a town planner is a breeze of a job, at least in most European cities. “You want to make a change? Request denied.” If you’re in charge of Venice, you know your livelihood depends on preserving the look of the city (or, the old portion of it) at all costs. What happens behind the façade is none of your business.

Swiss cities seem less concerned about preserving their old towns: a few, like Lucerne, make sme Francs off of their medieval structures (until they burned down), but mostly concerned themselves with steady growth and prosperity. Nor was there any need for the type of radical overhaul necessary in, say, Paris, where, Baron Haussmann famously leveled entire neighborhoods to give cannons a straight shot at the peasants manning the barricade.

So it seems to be, at least, with our first stop, St. Gallen. By now you are probably familiar with the role the Irish played in preserving Christianity – the short: dark age barbarians pushed the remnants of Roman Christianity to the backest of Western European backwaters, Ireland. Frankish power restored some semblance of peace and security. Irish missionaries returned to the continent and, supported by the Franks, found fertile ground for converts. So it was when (according to our resident local, my mother’s spouse Ernesta) Irish monk Gallenus found a pleasing Alpine hillside to call home, and started to attract a following.

Give or take a few hundred years, and the Swiss would discover independence (including how to beat a mounted knight, without gunpowder); a few hundred more, and they figured out how to make the insurance business pay off. What you have now is a prosperous town untouched by strife or complication; the Swiss, indeed, thrive on consensus (not a small trick – Switzerland has four official languages).

A few hallmarks of that general prosperity: any baron can throw up an ornate castle, but local burghers only have a few square meters of storefront to work with. Look especially for the preponderance of carved woodwork in the doorframes and overhangs, you could spend an hour on a short alley if you really wanted. But also note the shops behind these storefronts – working enterprises (tax accountants & such) or decidedly useful stores (Globus or H&M). St. Gallen at lunchtime is a hive of local activity, without a tourist in sight. A stop here later in the trip would have been refreshing indeed.

St. Gallen’s main church is large and clearly still functional: I often wonder if the other “sight-seeing” churches in Europe get any practical use. Does the Duomo in Florence still have an active congregation? Do the parishioners at the Wieskirche ever look around and say, “man, this is just too much decoration”? St. Gallen’s church carries a smattering of baroque touches, along with the Germanic love of gleaming white walls that projects order and cleanliness. I’m told church attendance in western Europe clocks in somewhere around 10%, but you wouldn’t know it here. It's well kept, but clearly not a museum.

We weren’t going to spend all day in St. Gallen – this was early in the trip, and we were starving for half-timbered cuteness. 40 minutes later we parked the van in Appenzell Town, which fit the bill neatly. Appenzell Town consist of an adorable main street that runs from its central square over to the river, with a few side streets to duck down. Cows and barns are within 500 yards of the village center. Pastoral smell is pervasive. We found a fairly well rated lunch spot and settled in with a few local specialties.

Look – I’m there for the cheese. Barring a fondue, I opted for the Kaeseschnitte, melted Appenzeller cheese over thick farmer’s bread; the English call this a rarebit. For the kids, we ordered a breaded-fried wedge of cheese – think Greek saganaki. As a reminder, Germanic food is seldom deep-fried. Usually it’s pan-fried, which means french fries will generally confuse a local kitchen (though they’re offered everywhere). I liked my cheese, as did the boys (the English menu called their entrée a cheese-steak). Their dish came with a fresh beet salad that was a revelation.

A curiosity: I have always worked under the myth of “American portions” – that our restaurants pile the plates up with food, and Europeans dole out more sensible portions. We found this to be the case nowhere. Each of us could have easily split their entrée, here and beyond. We though this may have been a tourist town fluke, and it took us nearly a week to finally learn that the portions were huge everywhere.

Anyway, repasted, we ambled down the main drag; the central square was under complete repair, off-limits. I had threatened my wife with the purchase of a garden gnome for our humble Birmingham abode – I considered these to be particularly German, but who knew? The largest selection of these would be found here. Once we bothered to look, we noticed garden gnomes all over Switzerland.

Tourist shopping is nearly impossible here – they have shops, but the Franc conversion rate makes any purchase unaffordable. E.g., $100 for a leather belt for Holman: sorry, can’t do it. Later, we’d learn just how extreme the Swiss cost of living is, but for now we chalked it up to tourist mark-up, and headed on. There was, after all, still a cheese farm and chocolate factory on the list.

Well, at this point you have to decide if you’re going to throw your kids a bone. So far, a little boredom was setting in for them – town seeing isn’t their agenda. Cheese farms are OK for kids, but they needed to get a little excitement in the works. We struck out towards one of those alpine cart-slide installations, you know, a wheeled sled track curving down a hill. That’s going to perk them up. Sadly, just as we pulled up, a few rain drops came. The operator of the track said they close under such conditions – darn you, Swiss liability laws! With much driving ahead (to get back to Konstanz, and then for me to take the boys to overnight with Nonna and Nesta) we had to skip the chocolate and cheese installations. We ducked into a chocolate shop -- the boys got a selection. That'll work.

Look, you can’t do everything, and don’t feel sad for that fact. Try to focus on what you did get to. Swiss towns may lack the “wow” sights – the large cathedrals or canaled quarters – but they make up for it with charm and authenticity. I never once got the sense in St. Gallen that some town planner was saying “no, that’s not cute enough.”